Shitting On Coney Island
When the creek was in my living room, that is when I started paying attention to it.
Elementary students lined up outside of P.S. Michael E. Berdy 188 after a night of rainfall during the rainiest September in New York City’s history. On the corner of Thirty-third Street and Neptune in Coney Island, this was not a typical K-5 student commute. Parents assembled on the street ahead of their children, buckets in hand, to scoop up water full of contaminants, including raw sewage, out of the road so that their kids can cross the street to attend classes—a routine all too common for families living near Coney Island Creek.
As one of Brooklyn’s few tidal inlets, the creek has endured state and federal government neglect, which has led to transportation disruptions, sewage overflow, runoff from streets, household waste, human feces and urine, and flooding from coastal front storms. Now, residents are taking matters into their own hands.
“When the creek was in my living room, that is when I started paying attention to it,” said Pamela Pettyjohn, co-founder and president of the Coney Island Beautification Project, and resident of the neighborhood for over thirty-five years. “That’s when everyone started paying attention to Coney Island Creek.” The Project was established in 2012 after Superstorm Sandy to restore the neighborhood through community cleanups and environmental education.
Pettyjohn’s living room was flooded during Sandy due to improper flood mitigation systems on the coastline and sewage overflow from nearby drainage pipes. Damage done to some households in the area during the hurricane has still not been addressed, and Pettyjohn said that the conditions have only gotten worse since 2012. However, the pollution did not begin after the hurricane. It has been ongoing since halfway through the twentieth century, when industrial furniture manufacturing, plastic bag, and paint factories swarmed the creek’s shorelines. In addition, the project to revitalize the Coney Island peninsula for easier water transportation left the creek littered with debris and contaminants.
Coney Island Creek is an inlet located between the north shore of the island and the neighborhood of Gravesend on the mainland. According to the City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Coney Island Creek receives about 290 million gallons of sewage and wastewater as well as an additional 1,487 gallons of stormwater annually. The creek is also home to many forms of native wildlife–horseshoe crabs and winter flounder, borderline endangered species that need the creek to breed. Migratory birds and insects, like the monarch butterfly, have stopped resting at Coney Island Creek during their flight patterns due to its pollution. The creek is also no longer safe for humans to use recreationally. What was once a popular fishing spot is no longer safe due to the contamination of raw sewage in the water. The state Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared in October of 2021 that the seafood population surrounding Coney Island to be at risk of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination, which can lead to cancer, endocrine disruption, and auto-immune conditions.
In addition to the creek’s history of pollution and mistreatment, the sewer lines surrounding the area are too weak to sustain the population. In 2016, the Beach Haven apartments, located at the border of Gravesend and Coney Island, were dumping 200,000 gallons of raw sewage into the creek on a daily basis. The sewage was coming from an illegal sewer connection constructed by the apartment complex themselves because the sewage pipe nearest to them was no longer able to withstand the daily waste of the development.
That was also the same year that the DEP proposed a Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) for Coney Island Creek. The city agency has control plans in place for nearly all of the water bodies in and surrounding NYC’s five boroughs. Passed in April of 2018, the plan for the creek aimed to expand an existing wastewater treatment facility on Avenue V and implement green infrastructure to mitigate flooding. Since the plan’s approval, however, there has been little progress made on Coney Island Creek’s pollution and mistreatment.
Craig Hammerman, a local Coney Island Resident and former District Manager for Community Board 6, said that the LTCP was a performative measure taken by New York State to show the federal government that it was in compliance with the Clean Water Act, though no extensive work was done to reduce sewage overflow and contaminants in the creek.
“I’m sure the DEP got some lovely new offices at their Avenue V facility,” said Hammerman, who describes himself as a Southern Brooklyn Advocate. “But it did not solve our problems.”
Hammerman currently fights for Coney Island Creek to be accredited as a spot on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Priority List (NPL), which would grant the creek superfund status. Superfunds, established by the federal government in 1980, hold responsible parties accountable for environmental pollution and require funds and immediate cleanup for recognized sites. In this case, the responsible parties are an amalgamation of NYC government facilities–the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the Department of Environmental Protection, who have neglected the creek. The most recent update for the candidacy of Coney Island Creek for superfund status was in January of 2022, in which the EPA filed a 3,000-page report with Community Board 13 and gave space for the community to create a next step plan.
Neither the EPA nor the DEP have responded to requests for comment on the superfund or cleanup status of Coney Island Creek at the time of publication.
In a recent Facebook post on October 26th, Hammerman stated, “When is the City of New York Going to Stop Shitting on Coney Island?” Hammerman was referring to the recent incident of the NYCHA Marlboro Houses in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, dumping sanitary waste in the creek. Mistreatment of the creek continues to this day. If the creek had superfund status, NYCHA would be forced to pay for immediate cleanup of the creek. (NYCHA has not responded to requests for comment on their illegal dumping into Coney Island Creek at the time of publication.)
Alongside a superfund status for Coney Island Creek, residents and organizers see green infrastructure as another potential solution to flooding and sewage overflow in the neighborhood. According to Shino Tanikawa, a member of the NYC Soil and Water Conservation District, simple rain gardens, more tree foliage, and more porous pavements could work wonders for flooding issues created by heavy rainfall as well as filtering pollutants from stormwater runoff before they reach and contaminate the creek. On the DEP’s online Map of Green Infrastructure, there is only one green infrastructure project in Coney Island.
Compared to neighborhoods like Gowanus and Greenpoint, also located on polluted water bodies, and have hundreds of finished and ongoing projects, Coney Island receives significantly less attention. Gowanus’ Gowanus Canal and Greenpoint’s Newtown Creek both became superfund sites in 2010. It is no coincidence that Gowanus and Greenpoint are gentrified neighborhoods. According to the Furman Center, in 2021, the average income in the Carroll Gardens and Gowanus area is $153,570; in Greenpoint, it is $107,630. Coney Island’s average income is $44,080. In addition, Carroll Gardens and Greenpoint are much less diverse communities compared to Coney Island. Coney Island houses more Black and Latinx residents than the other two neighborhoods.
“I think it’s worth pointing out that folks who are advocating for Coney Island are predominantly people of color,” said Tanikawa. “Whereas folks advocating for Newtown Creek and Gowanus are predominantly white folks.”
Due to the demographics of the neighborhood, Coney Island qualifies as an Environmental Justice Community through the EPA and federal government, as well as a “Disadvantaged” Community through the state government. This is another argument that advocates use in an attempt to get Coney Island Creek recognized as a superfund site and to bring in other promised government funding.
Last year, the White House announced its “Justice40 Initiative,” vowing to spend 40 percent of federal investments on disadvantaged Environmental Justice Communities. Regardless of whether the site is granted superfund status, the federal and state governments already owe Coney Island residents a safe, habitable, recreational water body.
Coney Island Creek has enormous potential to become a clean, thriving home to animals and native plants, as well as a gathering place for local residents. In a community visioning program held by the New York Aquarium to allow local residents to voice their opinions on how to help the creek, one woman answered, “I want the creek to feel like a vacation in my own backyard.”